Another pretty dodgy game where we once again managed to scrape a result. This definitely didn’t feel like a 2-0. In fact given the general poor play on display from both teams in front of the goal, even one goal seemed to be beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. This post is going to be brief and thrown together. I had my COVID booster on Friday so we didn’t go to this game. I’m not particularly suffering from too many side effects, but it’s fair to say that this kind of game, where there wasn’t much of interest happening, would have been difficult to concentrate on even if I wasn’t in my own personal fug. Please bear this in mind when assessing the quality of this post. As is always the case when I watch a game on DAZN rather than attend it, I find it difficult to focus and therefore don’t bother going into too much detail in the post. Some might say the same about the posts on games I attend I guess. I know nothing more about this game than other people who were also watching online know. I have very little insight and am even struggling to think of any jokes. With all this in mind, let's get going on what is truly going to be a great blog post!
We failed to beat Sanfrecce last year, drawing 1-1 with them home and away, so it was nice to improve on that. We started pretty well. Well for about three minutes and then we were back to the same ponderous and inconsequential stuff that we’ve become so familiar with recently. One particularly frustrating moment was when we were breaking with three against two and somehow contrived to dither, let them get some more players back and then loop the ball high off the pitch for a goal kick. Kind of summed up the game to be honest. Our backheel pass count was very high but the backheel pass completion rate was very low. Everyone loves it when their team is winning comfortably and starts turning on the style. It’s not so much fun when you’re drawing 0-0 and failing to create anything and you have players backheel passing straight to the opposition or off the pitch. Normally this kind of play comes with confidence but that looks very lacking right now. It feels like our new tactics are to bore the pants off the opposition, until they get so worn down by the tedium that they let us score. We shouldn’t forget how badly Sanfrecce are doing so far this year. However, we still struggled to make any real chances against them. In the last game, we had only nine shots with only one on target which we scored. Astonishingly, we had even less shots in this game (only eight, but thankfully three were on target). I guess our first goal doesn’t count as a shot as it was an own goal. It’s really not much fun to watch us this year. Whoever we start the game with, we (almost always) struggle and we only ever get going when the subs start happening. The three undroppables whose performances I always seem to recently moan about had pretty dodgy games again. Shortly before our first goal, I said ‘please let Oshima take this corner’. As I saw him lining up for it I said ‘and please let us score from this’ and we did. So perhaps all year the problem has been me not asking for goals enough. I will endeavor to do this more in upcoming games.
We now don’t have a game till the start of April so the players can have a bit of a rest and Oniki can have a bit of a think. Although I suppose Yamane and Taniguchi aren’t going to be resting much. I suspect the result of Oniki’s think will be that we just keep on going as we are. To be fair though, the results have been generally positive. It’s just the performances that make getting a weekly COVID booster and its side effects more appealing than watching the match. Fingers crossed for some excitement sooner or later. But yeah, keep the wins coming too please.
The day of this game was a pretty fun day. All apart from the two hours we were actually in the stadium watching football. Once again we’ve come away from a match with a win which came hand in hand with a bit of a dodgy performance. Honestly, it’s a miracle that we’re top of the league at the moment. Although perhaps we won’t be when the teams behind us have played the same amount of games as we have. All year I have been expressing some surprise at both how badly we’ve been playing and how we’ve been getting results. probably the only memorably good periods we’ve had were the first 20 minutes against Kashima and parts of the second half against Gamba. Perhaps it’s significant that we had ‘the reserves’ playing for the former and also that in the latter, we needed subs to change our fortunes. The pretty much regular starting line up that Oniki has been going with for five out of six of the league games hasn’t been doing the job. Whether this is due to players not playing well, tactics not working or a general decline in our fortunes and qualities it’s hard to say. Probably a bit of all of the above to be honest. There were some small causes for optimism in this match, but they were steamrollered by the usual dull and ineffective tactics and play. Also, many aspects of this game have been steamrollered by some pre and post match drinking. The morning after I woke up feeling ok but with a slight unease and disorientation which I attribute equally to the alcohol and the experience of watching this game. Once again, we have some work to do. Whether we will do it is another matter. I have very few notes on the match, only one thing about Nagoya (Leo Silva is a diver) and not much about the ref (giving yellows one way only, let himself get overruled by some Nagoya complaints at one stage), so this could be mercifully brief!
Let’s talk a bit about our problems. I eat too much, I probably drink too much, need to do more exercise, jump to conclusions a bit, can get overly emotionally involved with things. Oh, hang on, I meant Frontale's problems! Wakizaka and Yamane are still well off the pace and well off their best. I can’t see Oniki changing Yamane to give him a break and it seems that Wakizaka is the first name on the team sheet. I wonder if the significance of wearing the number 14 shirt is weighing on him a bit. Kengo, have a word and tell him to just relax please. Or Oniki, give him a rest for a game. The fact that we don’t have a game till next weekend almost certainly means that he’ll be in the starting line up again. Oniki doesn’t seem to want to rotate even when we have a packed schedule, so a week without a midweek game surely will mean no changes. Although there is actually one that he needs to make as Chanathip has picked up his fourth yellow so will miss the next game due to a suspension. Four yellows seems absurdly low to get a suspension to me, but those are the rules. I wonder if Chanathip suffers some kind of reverse big foreign player problem. In the way that if a big Brazilian gets fouled he’s perhaps a bit less likely to get the free kick as the refs have it in their mind that he must be faking as he’s a big guy and wouldn’t go down so easily, I feel that Chana seems to get a yellow for every foul as the refs think he’s so small that in order for the opposition player to go down he must have been fouled badly. Equally, the refs seem to think that he’s so small that any time he goes down, it’s because of his size and isn’t a foul. He seems to get everything given against him and nothing given for him. No complaints about his yellow in this game though. Didn’t see the same rule getting applied to Nagoya though, but I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s a shame he’ll miss the next game as he seems to be getting better match by match. His pass for the goal was a lovely one, (although I feel that Damiao deserves a half assist for the dummy), and was one of many nice passes that he’s been trying recently. As our players get more in tune with what he’s doing I think we’ll only improve. His absence in the next game might give someone an opportunity to stake a claim for a spot. I wouldn’t mind seeing a big change in the midfield actually with Wakizaka getting rested too. Might make sense to start with a midfield pairing that we have used in a match when we’ve needed to up our game a bit.
I’m not sure the midfield is the whole problem though. We had only nine shots in this game. Only one of them was on target. Thankfully it went in (Langerak, J League’s best keeper etc. etc. made no saves in this game). Our lack of willingness to shoot is shocking. As is our lack os willingness to try another other ways of approaching the goal rather than short-passing it all the way to the goal line. When teams come to defend, (as surely more and more will as they see through our cunning plan of doing the same thing in every game for about three years), we could do with someone occasionally giving it a whack from distance. I guess understandings take some time to build up but you might have hoped that something like this might have been worked on in pre-season. Also, it is only Chanathip for Hatate that is the difference from last year. All a bit weird really. The longer we keep skating on thin ice but miraculously coming away with the points, the more chance we have of falling in the freezing water. Which happened against YFM but Oniki just gave them a towel and told them to try a different pond with equally thin ice for the next game. When Urawa trashed us in the Super Cup we were told that they would storm the league. They have four points from six games. Teams seem to be pleased when they lose unluckily to us but I think they are failing to notice quite how rubbish we are recently, and how us not beating them easily doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve played well. There now follows a short factual intermission where I roll out some stats comparing our first six games this year and last year. Don’t worry, this kind of useful content won’t last long and it will get back on to jokes and moaning soon. Points wise, we were only one win better off last year with 16 points instead of the 13 we have this year. But the goal difference was +10 and instead we have +3. Last year we had scored 14 and conceded four. This year it’s 10 and seven. It’s probably the shots that shows the real difference though. Last year we’d had 94 with 38 (about 40%) on target, but this year it’s 68 with 23 (roughly one in three) on target. So basically we’re shooting a lot less and a lot less accurately too, which isn’t exactly a great combination. In 2022 we average 3.8 shots on target per game, so we challenge the keeper less than twice per half. Which all might explain why my personal excitement factor has dropped from a 27.4356 in 2021 to a 7.3112 in 2022. In other words, praise the lord for pre-game drinking.
This has been a weird blog post. Some actually information in there. And mercifully short too! This game wasn’t perhaps as much of a disaster as I’ve made it sound but it was far from fun. I keep asking for a shake up but never really think it will happen. I think Oniki is in charge of the team (although Ienaga did appear to overrule him on his potential subbing), so I guess it’s down to him to shake us out of this performative slump. But the results probably mean that he might imagine that we’re doing ok. Of course it’s absurd to complain when we’re top of the table, but we’re only there as we’ve played more games and anyone who has watched our opening fixtures surely can’t help but feel slightly uneasy that the wheels are due to come flying off quite soon. Ironically, given our defensive woes, aside from the YFM game we’re not actually doing too badly at the back. But then again it does seem to be the case that either Sung-Ryong has a blinder and saves us or as was the case in the this game, the opposition also can’t shoot. Our next game is away at Hiroshima next weekend. These games are never particularly fun to watch and this time I’ll be doing it on my sofa the day after my COVID vaccine booster, so expect even more whinging next time. Or maybe we’ll find out that it is my attendance that is causing our dullness. Hopefully not, but whatever the reason, it would be nice if we could get past it soon.
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo
DF 15. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 18. CHANATHIP (Yellow card 15')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 23. MARCINHO
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu
MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for CHANATHIP 60')
FW 19. TONO Daiya (on for WAKIZAKA 73')
FW 20. CHINEN Kei (on for LEANDRO DAMIAO 60')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 73')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
I mean, I dunno really. Let’s skip it this time as it wasn’t exactly great.
Apologies for the late arrival of this blog post. I’ve been luxuriating in the fact that we don’t have a game for six days after this one so have slacked off a little. Also, work has been busy but I’m sure you’re not interested in that. Our weird 2022 season continued in this game at Gamba. This was the first time we’ve actually been able to attend this fixture for a few years and perhaps to celebrate us being there again the two teams served up a repeat scoreline of the last time we visited the Suita stadium, (although the order of the goals was a bit different on this occasion). The game will almost certainly be remembered for the cheeky equaliser that Kobayashi made for Damiao by stealing the ball off an unaware Gamba keeper. I say almost certainly, as it’s unlikely that Frontale fans will particularly want to remember much else about the game. And Gamba fans will want to forget it because of the late equaliser but presumably won’t be able to erase the memory particularly easily. To get my main point out of the way quite early here, I think a draw was probably the right result. Again we weren’t great and it would be difficult to argue that we deserved to win… But the second Gamba goal was a bit of a freak one… And Damiao missed a very good chance perhaps trying to overcomplicate things in the first half… And we hit the post and totally dominated the second half (when we weren’t conceding from one of the two shots Gamba had in that second half…). So things probably evened out in the end. Slightly worryingly the last time we were able to go to Suita (when it also finished 2-2) was in our disaster 2019 season. There are probably already a few too many similarities to that season which are cropping up for any Frontale fan to be particularly comfortable or satisfied with our start to 2022. But if you are looking for some reason to be positive, perhaps you can find it in the fact that our 95th minute cheap equaliser prevented us from equaling our total season defeats last year. In 2021 we lost twice. In 2022 we’ve come very close to losing twice within the first five games. Hang on, this was supposed to be talking about some reason to be positive and I seem to have undermined it… Oh well. Let’s get on with this post and excuse me if it’s a bit detail free. I got to the game with a slight hangover from the evening before, was distracted by being pretty cold during the game as I had dressed inappropriately for the weather and had my hoodie break on arrival at the stadium and then have left this too late to remember things particularly well. Plenty of disclaimers already so this post is bound to be a banger…
Let’s talk about Gamba first. The pre-game announcement of a Gamba old boy guest for the ‘HEAT UP TIME’ (personally could have done with some of that heat), was perhaps met with some confusion by some Gamba fans who might not remember Shohei Otsuka ever really playing for them. We definitely remember him though and it was great to see him back. He was a somewhat random signing for us when he joined but I remember how excited I was when he scored and he had a nice song too. Also he looked pretty cool rocking the baseball cap look as, as many men of a certain age (admittedly a bit older than he was, but it happens to plenty of people) he always seemed to be slightly at war with his hair. I think I am suffering from a similar problem recently to be honest. A quick word of praise for the Gamba big screens which seemed to show some genuinely interesting information during the game. This is all a bit too positive so far… We never seem to have things our way at Suita and this was no exception. In spite of them having plenty of absences and a few makeshift partnerships on the pitch we by no means did well in this game in the first half. Gamba didn’t do much better with both teams only having a couple of shots on target in the first 45 minutes, but Gamba did manage to put one away with a nice finish. I suspect I could single out some individuals to moan about if I rigorously rewatched the goal but I think it’s better for everyone if we just move on. I hope our management team might pay a bit more attention to us conceding another goal though as it’s becoming worryingly common this year. Last year we conceded 28 goals in 38 games. This year we’ve done seven in our first five games, so basically are conceding around as twice as many as last year. But this is supposed to be the Gamba section. Gamba fans have got a few things to be annoyed/upset about regarding this game. Of course the late goal was an absolute howler. But I guess this happens once in every keeper’s career. Once and then every single time for the next however many years they always check over their shoulder before dropping the ball. If I were a Gamba fan, I probably would be a bit upset that the keeper wasn’t warned by any of his defenders. And then wasn’t even consoled by any of his defenders until Damiao had taken the lead. But it was a freak goal. It’s a shame that it had to happen to their third choice goalkeeper who is clearly going to be thinking about that mistake for quite a long time. It’s impossible not to feel for him. At the same time though it was impossible for Frontale fans not to be excited about us once again getting off the hook. More Gamba frustration will come from the fact that Usami left the pitch with what has now turned out to be a ruptured Achilles. He rejected a move to us in the off-season so when fate took over the controls he was either going to have a great game and score a hat trick or have a nightmare and it turned out to be the latter. Once again, it’s impossible not to feel sorry for him. One person who it isn’t impossible to feel sorry for, and this is something of a surprise given that he is an ex-Frontale player, got a ridiculous undeserved red a few weeks ago and seems like a genuine nice guy off the pitch in spite of apparently hating Frontale, is Patric. Once again he showed that he’s not afraid to dish out a but of physicality whilst at the same time having the incredible talent to find an elbow in an empty room. He spent a lot of time on the floor and gesturing for cards but I guess that this isn’t a massive surprise. He also seemed to have a shirt with ridiculously short sleeves. When plenty of players were wearing undershirts Patric seemed to be rolling his already short sleeves up even higher. I would say that it’s a risky game to play when you consider how much time he spent lying on the cold pitch. (Didn’t really have many disses for Gamba so have had to resort to some pretty petty stuff here, as you can see). To get a bit of ref talk in here, this week’s ref was Yamamoto and he is from the ‘give less’ school of reffing. This season has been dominated by the ‘give more’ school so far with loads of bookings and red cards handed out. I’m still not sure which approach I prefer, but I will say I really don’t like the refs that give us loads of cards and don’t give the opposition any. Perhaps along with our title hopes, our hopes of becoming the fair play team of 2022 are also disintegrating horribly quickly. Perhaps I could also mention the Gamba manager Katanosaka, who seemed to be putting in some wild moves on the touchline. In stark contrast to their previous boss who I guess had more success in coordinating his casual wardrobe than organising his team and projected a calm and cool persona (or perhaps one with zero shits given) mid game, the new guy was jumping and waving his arms like the bride’s father at his daughter’s wedding who after spending the day worrying has had a few too many glasses of booze during the meal, done his speech and has just heard his favourite song from his youth kick in at the reception disco. Oniki has a lot to learn from him in terms of entertainment. We don’t want to see magnet work and the occasional guts pose, we want to see arm-waving and punk scissor kicks. But maybe he hasn’t got much to be excited about at the moment….
Yes, we’re still a bit shit. Aside from Kashima we’re not starting games very well this year. And aside from this one we’re not doing too well at the end. And the middle part isn’t great either. So far this season we’ve been consistently pretty disappointing. I don’t know if this is because of players leaving. Certainly some serious damage was done when Tanaka and Mitoma left. After they went we looked pretty ordinary last year but somehow held things together. This season sees us also without Hatate and Chanathip, who is perhaps his replacement hasn’t quite settled in yet but seems to be an automatic pick regardless of his form. To be honest though, I think it’s more to do with a majority of players having poor starts to the season though. Wakizaka had another game to forget and Yamane, apart from scoring against Urawa (whilst having a not very good game I thought) is also struggling to get his form back. I’m not sure many others have done much better. Oshima has disappeared recently and whilst some have speculated that this might be due to injury, I wouldn’t say he’s had a great start either. We just need a bit of confidence probably. But as soon as we can build some up we destroy it for ourselves. Less than a minute after the restart after we equalised we’d conceded again, and it wasn’t a surprise really as we’d dithered and faffed around for all of those fifty seconds. Admittedly what looked like a wonder goal at the time was (probably) a deflected cross. Probably a cross, definitely deflected. But much like against YFM we had got back in the game only to get ourselves back out of the game pretty quickly. Perhaps this contributed to Oniki not being very happy at the end of the game, but I feel he has to start taking a bit of responsibility for things too. The triple sub in the second half totally changed the game and we looked a lot better after Ienaga, Kozuka, Kobayashi and then a little afterwards Miyagi came on. So perhaps we shouldn’t have started with the eleven we did. I realise I have been saying that Ienaga hasn’t been playing great recently so I am somewhat contradicting myself here, but that’s par for the course for internet ‘experts’ so I’m going to roll with it. All four of these subs contributed greatly. Ienaga and Kozuka tore up Gamba and made loads of opportunities for us and Kozuka’s assist for the first goal was lovely! Sadly no one wanted to shoot, until Miyagi came on, who pretty much only wants to shoot, but as I’m sure he would tell you, you don’t score if you don’t shoot. And then Kobayashi was very smart for the late equaliser. I feel like Oniki is still trying to fit square pegs in round holes though. I love Chinen and Kobayashi, but can’t help but feel that it makes more sense to play a left sided attacker in the left sided attacker role. In recent years we’ve been overflowing with these kind of players but now we only seem to have Miyagi and Marcinho (who I guess might have had COVID given his absence but is now apparently in training. So if he hasn’t had it that’s even more of a mystery…) and perhaps Tono. But then again Tono rarely gets played there anyway and is more often in midfield. Our formation leaves us one main striker spot and Damiao, Kobayashi and Chinen have all showed that they have a decent shout at getting that, but perhaps this has contributed to Oniki trying to play them elsewhere instead. I just wish we’d shoot a bit more. We don’t get extra points for exceeding 60% possession as we did in this game (bit of luck considering our low possession in previous games this year, I guess), so I wish we’d try and be a bit more direct before we concede and end up chasing the game. But maybe this is just a sticky patch. But the end of last season was a similarly sticky patch… At least now we are the ones scoring the late goals unlike late last season (although those late goals from Urawa and Oita won them the tie instead of grabbing a draw from the jaws of defeat as we did here). It’s great that we’ve got subs to bring on a change the game, but it would be nice if we didn’t start so shittily. One quick last mention for Damiao again, as aside from being a great guy consoling the distraught Gamba keeper also celebrated his goal with what we think is a dove of peace celebration. It’s so nice to have a player who is both a great footballer and a great human being. Is this where I should mention Yuma Suzuki again? Actually forget him.
So, on we trot, wobbling from one shaky victory to a defeat, to a couple of games with decent spells where we just about got over the line and then this game where our positive aspects were met with a similarly sized serving of self sabotage. Or maybe this is all bad luck… I don’t really think that’s what’s happening before anyone gets annoyed about THE ARROGANCE. I wish people would get the jokes a bit more in these posts. Perhaps the ‘jokes’ should be a bit better. We definitely need to buck up our ideas though as those sailors from down the road are having similarly flaky results but crucially scoring a few more goals so are top. And most of the league has played two fewer games than us. Aside from about 20 mins in the Kashima and Urawa games this season has been a bit of a grind so far. It would be lovely if we could shoot a bit more and then we might actually score a bit more often. But maybe we’ve played five difficult games so far and things will get easier… Maybe. Next up is Nagoya at home at the weekend. We’ll have had a bit of a break, and we’ll get another couple of breaks between the following two games. All of which might suggest we might not have needed to squeeze so many games in at the start of the season but hey, what do I know? I’ll be pleased to not have to write a blog post every few days as while I theoretically enjoy doing these, it does become a bit of a pain in the neck when the games are coming thick and fast. Fingers crossed we can play a bit better against a Nagoya team who’ve had a pretty mixed start to 2022 under their new manager. I’m hoping Oniki can get us a decent win and a decent performance. If that’s not possible, I’ll just settle for a rotten performance and a massive win. Fingers crossed.
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo(Yellow card 45')
DF 15. SASAKI Asahi
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 18. CHANATHIP
FW 20. CHINEN Kei
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 19. TONO Daiya
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki(on for SASAKI 81')
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (on for TONO 58')
MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for CHANATHIP 58')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for CHINEN 75')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for WAKIZAKA 58')
My Frontale Man Of The Match
As ridiculous as it is to give this to multiple players, as mentioned above the subs changed this game and all contributed in their own way. Therefore, it’s going to…
IENAGA Akihiro, KOZUKA Kazuki, KOBAYASHI Yu and MIYAGI Ten - respectively for the following reasons, confidence, beautiful assist, smart assist, goal and hit the post.
Well that was a bit more fun than the Super Cup. Don’t forget everyone, Urawa are going to win the league this year (according to Twitter after that game, when we were absolutely awful). Clearly Kyoto, Kobe and Gamba didn’t get the memo about that. Urawa now find themselves second bottom, with one point from four games, ahead only of FC Tokyo who’ve played just the one league game. It’s never a particularly good look when someone enjoys the misfortune of a rival, but to be honest, I’m sure everyone does it at least secretly. Or not so secretly when we lost the Super Cup final. Obviously, I don’t expect that many other J League fans recently want us to ever win. We all have our underlying feelings about and impressions of other teams which adds to the excitement of getting one over on them. The latest reason for rival fans to dislike Urawa was proudly displayed at the start of the game when they unveiled a massive flag saying ‘男なら。。。’ (basically, ‘if you’re a man…’). In recent years stupid macho bullshit has caused misery all over the world and that was probably noticed by the ‘greatest fans in Japan’ who thought they too could run with the idiocy. At the end of the game they revealed one of the longer message flags that they do. It completed the phrase stating something along the lines of ‘if you’re an Urawa man you will fight to the death’. I’m not sure if they had a different message prepared in case they won or whether we were just supposed to interpret the message differently depending on the result. I’m not sure if ‘death’ means J2, but if they continue their current form that looks like the direction they’re heading, albeit proudly clutching the Super Cup. Of course it’s early in the season, but it isn’t looking good for them, but with that in mind, at the same time it’s looking good for plenty of people who don’t like them. Perhaps the masculinity is supposed to be expressed through surrounding the ref every time a decision doesn’t go your way. In which case, well done for being very manly, Urawa players. Not sure if it’s also macho to go down clutching your face when you’ve been touched on the shoulder. The manliness of the fans was shown by a section of them singing and booing (what a surprise!) even though that is still not allowed. Of course such a rule would never work in other countries but it seems to work for pretty much every other J League team’s fans. Urawa fans are especially manly though I guess, so it’s impossible to tame such passion. Sorry that should have said ‘childishness’ not ‘passion’. My mistake! And honestly it probably should come as any kind of surprise that Urawa’s fans would be in to machismo, as they must have a flag for an almost unlimited number of synonyms of man, ranging from the youthful ‘boys’ through the up for it ‘lads’ to the French restaurant waiter-ish ‘garçons’. (All genuine flags, I was going to make some funny ones up, but to be honest, I don't think I can top 'garçons'). Clearly they want to tell us something. Anyway, I’ve probably written enough here to make Urawa fans angry (which isn’t my intention but seems to be inevitable somehow), so I’ll move on to writing something about us.
I know it’s especially difficult at the moment to interpret starting line-ups and squads. Its usual practice for us to never get any information about injuries, and especially not before line-ups are announced. Kurumaya got injured about two weeks ago and we’ve only just heard it will be at least another month out for him (dislocated shoulder apparently, thanks to FC Tokyo’s foul machine SBO). Our game against Kashima was a lot of fun, mainly due to great performances and goals from Chinen and Sasaki. Naturally both dropped out of the squad for this game… Sasaki did leave the pitch on a stretcher after an amazing full debut but I felt that there was an element of running down the clock with that change as it almost seems that Nobori was ready to come on already. Whether he was unavailable for inclusion in this game or whether it was Oniki keeping his feet on the ground I don’t know. Hopefully the latter, as even if I don’t necessarily agree with doing it, we’ll now need him in the next game as Nobori got crocked in this match, seeming to pull up whilst trying to track back. Chinen seems to have been the preferred replacement for Damiao this season with Kobayashi having to fill in in other places when he gets the chance. So it was a bit surprised to see Chinen disappear too. Oniki’s rotation has always been a bit weird and if that’s what’s happening recently, it continues to be a bit weird. Although to be honest, he’s only rotating up front it seems, as we have zero other Oniki approved options at the back and since Tachibanada is back, the midfield always seems to stay the same. Oshima disappearing from squads recently has surprised and confused some, but I’d probably say that he hasn’t been on fire really this year. But the same could definitely be said about Wakizaka and he’s keeping his place. The bench on this occasion might suggest that we have some unmentioned problems behind the scenes. Joao Schmidt was back after it seemed like he was starting another period of exile. As was Seko who seemed to be being exiled for even less reason than Joao. But as I said, we never can tell what injuries or infections there might be that we don’t know about. Having a bench of five midfielders, (which didn’t include Oshima), Kobayashi and Tanno probably wasn’t anyone’s pre-match prediction. I wonder if Oniki is now approaching games in the same way that you can start a game of Tetris with half the board full already for an extra challenge. ‘Maybe it would be fun if we tried to counter Urawa’s probable 5-5 formation with a bench full of midfielders, most of whom I have no intention of using for more than 5 minutes.’ Was great to see Tsukagawa get some more pitch time. Well it was for me anyway. Not so delighted that he was asked to fill in at left back for over an hour. It was a wobbly start but I think he really grew into it. It was a bit of a wobbly start from everyone to be honest. We didn’t look particularly comfortable again, but at least this time we left it a bit later till we conceded. It was pretty awful defending for their goal with the scorer being able to evade both Ienaga and Tachibanada by running into the gap between them. Cue Urawa reverting to the second part of their 2022 game plan, sit back and look for counter attacks. But at least in this game we were creating a little more than we did in the Super Cup. We were made to wait though, and the bulk of the excitement for us came within a few minutes of the second half when Ienaga (who was having a bit of a dodgy game again) headed in from a corner and then Yamane (who was having a bit of a dodgy game again) smashed one in a couple of minutes later. This gave us something of a confidence boost and we started playing a bit better. Confidence does seem to be something of a rare commodity for us this year. I hope that we can start games with it in the future, rather than starting on an even keel, having some calamity knock us back and then have to slowly build up to something approaching positivity. If we are wracked with injuries at the moment we should take some confidence from the fact that we’re kind of surviving right now. We aren’t playing particularly fun football for most of our games but somehow we’ve won three games out of four so that should count for something. We went in at half time in this game with 50% possession but only three shots, none on target, two yellow cards, a goal behind and with a few major let-offs, and with a defensive midfielder in the bombing-on left back position. In a way it could only get better and thankfully it did. It didn’t particularly feel like we scraped through when we got to full time and took the win though, but we’d definitely not shown ourselves at our best. And it was lovely to get some revenge for the Super Cup. Although we didn’t really turn up on that occasion so perhaps revenge is a bit of an excessively emotional word. It’ll do though!
What Frontale rabbit post would be complete with a moan about the ref? This year has been a weird one for refs it seems. Quite a lot have been extremely card happy and perhaps we can put this down to some change in the the interpretation of the rules. However, against Kashima last week we had a ref who didn’t hand out any yellows at all. Perhaps this was the Yuma Suzuki effect though. Given that he’s been the recipient of some very generous decisions so far this year perhaps refs will now view any incident he’s involved in with a bit of cynicism. But not sure why that would work both ways for both teams though. But anyway, that was last week’s game. In this match we had Sato, in charge of his third match of the season. He seems to clearly be in the card happy group of refs, giving out 10 yellows and sending off two players in three games. Once again the shitness of a ref seems to be uniting both sets of fans. Urawa fans complained that Damiao wasn’t sent off. In my opinion, this is an absolutely bat shit crazy opinion but at the same time I’m not surprised that Urawa fans would hold it. I’m not going to complain about the Taniguchi or Chanathip bookings but the ones for Tsukagawa and Kobayashi seemed pretty insane. Tsukagawa fell over, the Urawa player then tripped over Tsukagwaa and won the free kick that they scored from and got Tsukagawa booked. Unless Tsukagawa has a previous reputation for attempting to tackle with his head or by throwing himself to the floor for the opposition to trip over, I can’t see why the foul was even given. Kobayashi’s was equally ridiculous. He also fell over and the ball hit his supporting arm, which as far as I know isn’t even supposed to count as a free kick, let alone a yellow card. I can to some extent understand the former, but the latter seems just stupid. But then again we are talking about a ref so if the cap fits… But never mind eh? The ref was again awful but we won, and if Urawa fans are going to get their knickers in a twist about how cheated they were when I feel that they were given pretty much everything, well, I’m just going to enjoy their irritation. But don’t cry guys. Real men don’t cry I’ve heard.
One last thing I wanted to ask, which I’m just going to stick to the top of this conclusion paragraph is whether the league wide font that the J League has introduced is absurdly difficult to read or is that just me? Answers on a postcard please. Next up we have a trip to Gamba on Sunday. Because of COVID, it’s been ages since we’ve been able to go to the Suita stadium so I’m really looking forward to it. Gamba beat Urawa 1-0 and we beat them 2-1, so I guess it’s going to be an even game. (Or is everyone going to beat Urawa this year?). It will be interesting to see what happens when the starting line up wheel gets spun again. I’m not going to predict anything because… well what’s the point really. There are way too many unknowns at the moment. Fingers crossed we can start the game well and retain some of the confidence we discovered in the second half of this game.
Team
GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG DF 13. YAMANE Miki
DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya
DF 5. TANIGUCHI Shogo(Yellow card 45')
DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
MF 18. CHANATHIP(Yellow card 63')
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro
FW 9. LEANDRO DAMIAO
FW 19. TONO Daiya
Subs
GK 27. TANNO Kenta
MF 3. TSUKAGAWA Koki(Yellow card 32') (on for NOBORIZATO 26')
MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT (on for WAKIZAKA 88')
FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu (Yellow card 81') (on for TONO 76')
MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki
MF 17. KOZUKA Kazuki (on for CHANATHIP 76')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
My Frontale Man Of The Match
I’m not picking this player because I’m biased. But I am biased, so if you want to interpret it that way please feel free to. It must go to…
TSUKAGAWA Koki - rarely starts and but always gives 100%. Apparently has never played left back even in training and after a slightly nervous start, really did a job there in difficult circumstances. Bravo!
Sanfrecce Hiroshima 0 - 2 Kawasaki Frontale
